Animus
by Cymria.2.0
Summary: Clove Helliot and her defeated pack of Careers have been resurrected by the Capitol. In a place where too much is expected of them in so little time, it becomes difficult for them to fare. The pack have one thing on their minds: to kill Katniss Everdeen. The Rebels? They're thinking of something else entirely. (Rating may change.)
1. Pt1 - (Glimmer) Into the Past

_**WARNING:**_ Rated for language and innuendo. here will be violence, and there will be fighting. The rating might even change later in the story. I don't want people to get any unpleasant surprises.

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**PART ONE: INTO THE PAST**

**(POV - Glimmer)**

I remember being told that the Quarter Quell happened before my resurrection.

As far as I knew at the time, I wasn't the only tribute from the 74th games to be brought back from the dead. There was also my district partner, the tributes from 2 ... only the Careers, I came to realize. And being revived was a terrible experience.

It wasn't like we tributes were bursting at the seams with things to tell each other, but we weren't given much time to socialize following our resurrections. Everything seemed hurried and panicked; there were doctors poking at me, forcing their faces in mine and bombarding me with questions I wasn't nearly capable of answering. A handful of my former stylists forced clothing over the tracker jacker scars, and they dismissed each of my questions with anxious kisses on my cheeks and squeezes of my wrists.

Taking us former Career tributes one-by-one on a trip behind the Capitol stage was Atala as stage lights shone blindingly on the wall's opposite side. Following the head trainer, I didn't fail to notice the nasty bruise tainting Atala's right cheek or the purple, tired stains that hung low under the trainer's eyes. Atala gave me a promise of home, a pledge I assumed had given to the others as we all milled onto the stage.

Then the trainer forced a script into my hands before shoving me to the first spot in our stony line of Careers, collecting us to the edge of the stage where I was hoping we couldn't be seen. I had been shaking, and my mind went through a steady flow of questions that the stylists and Atala hadn't answered. I touched the soft bumps of Tracker Jacker scars that covered my skin beneath brown sleeves.

Atala announced to us that we would be speaking before all of Panem. Well, her exact words had been, "What's left of it," and that did very little to calm my nerves, which were practically just doing stinking back-flips.

I had spoken in front of an audience before. I had lept before a crowd and stared down hundreds of would-be volunteers, daring them to try and steal my thunder. But this time, the experience felt very changed; stiff, almost. Different. The crowd was empty for all but a a handful of advisers sprinkled about the fronts rows of seats. Perched silently upon the chair closest to the stage was President Snow, just where Xamitz, my head stylist, had sat to watch me during the interviews.

Snow's hands were cold and wrinkled folded in his lap. His silver eyes gazed over us Careers with a serpentine likeness, and I wanted to snap at Clove for having the gall to look at him the way she did, like she was thoughtfully calculating out of curiosity how many knives she'd have to throw to have him killed.

Heavy lights shone above our faces, and the stage had been emptied of all but a single chair in the corner where Ceasar Flickerman sat, a solemn look on his face and his tanned hands in his lap. We had been told by Atala to way our lines in district order. First me, then Marvel, then Clove. There was no sign of the boy from District Two, and that irked me. I wonder what they'd done with him. I wondered where he'd gone.

The atmosphere was timid as we stood in line onstage. We were reluctant to comply with the Capitol, but it was hope that made us do as we were told. We had been promised our homes and families. Lives back in the districts. It wasn't the perfect bargain, but it was better than being dead. It had been the single thing whisking us from insanity.

The dot flashed red, and I could tell by the narrowing of Snow's eyes that I was being recorded. I raised my scrip to my waist with careful hands, amazing myself with the number of things that I could notice right when I wasn't supposed to. The anxious scrunch of Clove's freckled nose. I bit my tongue in a literal attempt to bite back the nervousness I felt pulsing in my stomach. No, it wasn't nervousness; scratch that. It was the load of pressure that grew into a ton atop my shoulders.

Marvel's fingertips felt cold. They were brushing against mine, and I registered his touch too slowly. Too distractedly. I couldn't pull my hand away in time, and his seaweed-green eyes displayed more control than I'd ever seen him have in his entire life.

But there was fear. Clove had a little fear in her eyes, too, and she kept glancing at me sharply, her eyebrows furrowed. The nest had fallen. That had been the only other time I'd seen fear caked so thick in Marvel's eyes. I had screamed his name and he looked back twice and saw me thrashing, my skin bubbling under the swarm. And with a squeeze of his eyes and a jerk of his head, he had charged away on the heels of the District 12 female.

It was inexplicably hard for me to forgive him. It wasn't only his betrayal; I'd also grown quite a hatred for his perverted sense of humor and narcissism in the Capitol. He'd play jokes on my beauty for the cameras, jokingly imply that I whore myself to others... and this was all just for his own giggles and shits, even.

But sure, yeah. We both had our faults.

There was an easy air about him. Even with his usual smart-ass remarks and that awful smirk-smile he liked to plaster onto his face, I could almost say that I felt calm around him. Never safe. I had tried that once, and he'd abandoned me in a clearing to die. I would have tried to stab him on the stage, but all of Panem was right in front of me. They hated me and all of the other Careers except for Marvel. They wanted us dead, and now we were here to bother them in their suffering.

I inhaled a breath of air, letting my eyes fall down to the page in my hands. We were being made to play the role of the victims, I knew; to stand as an example.

The words came little easier than sacrifice. I spoke Katniss' name with quivering breaths, spouted to the crowd my 'disbelief.' Katniss' 'rebellious and outrageous' wrongdoings rendered me 'speechless with anger.'

My fluttery glances at the paper didn't do me any good. I had told myself that with each syllable, the script would become as easy as plunging a swords into a dummy. What an awful, tragic lie. It was as difficult as shoving one through the flesh of any actual tribute. It left me just as breathless. I struggled to rush my eyes to the camera, and in the forefront of my mind simmered the fact that I was barely aware of anything at all. I didn't know what Katniss had accomplished. It would come to affect my life.

I looked to Caesar for acceptance once I finished speaking the final words of my lines. I couldn't tell you what exactly I observed in the eyes of Panem's television host. Probably something hollow and meaningless. I was used to the Capitol proudly presenting hollow and meaningless things.

At the end of my very last line, the microphone pinned to my collar stopped receiving noise, and I watched for the shift in Marvel's expression as he took a breath to speak his lines. Far past the fatigue and confusion, something like anger was present in his gaze, but it was suppressed. He may not have known it, but the stresses of his experiences were etched into his face, small bags under his eyes for every tribute he'd killed.

He avoided Snow's serpentine gaze. Before I knew it, everything was over. They injected us with a substance. Clove, of course, put up a fight when a man in hospital garb approached her behind the stage. She threatened and punched, squirming, kicking until they finally pinned her to the ground. Marvel was injected in the middle of a question. I didn't hear quite what it was. It was muffled, like the voice of someone overhead when your ears are underwater. I didn't know it when I was injected because my skin could hardly feel anymore. The pain was about to be over. The confusion was going to end. And then my surroundings went black.

I had never found a problem with following the rules the Capitol set out for me. I was only an object to them, and that was alright. I had volunteered as if I were better and stronger than everybody else, but I had known I wouldn't win. Around the start of the games, I had to accept that I was going to die.

I am back inside the Capitol as of now. Marvel, Clove, and I. Three of us. Cato might not have even made it - Marvel and I are still in the dark regarding _that_. And I haven't seen Clove ... haven't seen Clove in days.

Things have changed.

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****A/N: Hey, people. This is one of my earlier fanfictions that I never really got the chance to post. I'm sort of going around and re-writing things, but I have it pre-written all the way to the end. I hope to get it all posted eventually, because people seem to like it! Reviews are amazing, no matter how late.****


	2. Pt2 - (Clove) A Daunting Present

**PART TWO: A DAUNTING PRESENT**

**(POV - Clove)**

When I come awake, the pain in my head bombards me with every inch of strength that it has. I'm knocked back down onto the bed with a major head rush. Hundreds of little tubes branch out of my skin. My brain swims. The room I'm in is stark-white in color, overwhelming with its brightness and its cold, empty feeling. A table is in the corner of the room. A single ivory chair sits next to it.

I should be in the games right now. Thresh should be pummeling my skull with a rock, and Cato's name should be on my lips, mixing with the blood and dirt, paining me with how much it hurts to scream. I should be listening to the noise of my own cannon echoing in the far distance. I should be drifting into blankness. Dead.

The plastic tubes slip from my body. I tear at them; swat them, strangle them with their own clear cords. A machine whirs beside me as I tug two slick tubes from either of my nostrils _'What's happening? Where is he?'_ I wonder. The crumminess in my throat is thick. The thoughts come so quick, so foggily and tangled in eachother that I can hardly make them out in my own mind. Where is Cato?

The bed creaks, its metal wheels half-turning with my movement. The realization hits me and I feel empty in the center. Cato is dead.

I don't cry because I'm too ashamed to do so. Instead, I force myself to evaluate my thoughts. With each idea that passes, it feels as if I'm dragging a blade over my own flesh. The initial pang of hurt comes first, and then the part that makes me wish I'd never been revived. The part that makes me feel like sleeping for an eternity.

An irritating beep emanates from the device beside me, and I watch as blood drips from the IV needle when I pull it from under my skin. A bit of it dribbles down my wrist and pools in harmless bubbles on the sheets.

Enobaria comes by and her dark brown eyes bore into mine, her fangs flashing angrily as she complains about my death in the games. Ha-ha, I was killed by an Eleven tribute_._ Such a lame death, I know, but try telling that to the tributes I killed in the arena. It's such a dark thought, but if they had tried hard enough, maybe they wouldn't have gotten their asses kicked. I don't even know who won.

Then my mentor tells me that I've been brought back to life - that I_ did_ die - and I find that hard to believe. Those deaths in the arena were _real_. The blood beneath my nails, the knives, the soft thud of a body slumping lifelessly to the ground... That was more real than anything had ever been to me.

And with a special little medicine, the Capitol can just reverse _death_. It's been a secret for a while, I suppose, but my voice rasps when I attempt to ask how long it's been being hidden. It's a thing that no-one outside of the government can know, I assume. A bunch of stupid, bull-crap secrets.

So, I'm in a hospital of sorts. A skinny doctor takes me though a few tests, like walking and bending over and doing freaking _squats, _and eventually, I'm able to escape those dipsticks. An aimless journey through the hallways, a few quiet sips of water from the fountains I shamble by, and my headache has nearly become bearable enough for me not to feel the immediate urge to stab the nurses I come across.

Another water fountain sits by, perched against a wall and beckoning my dry throat to come to it. I take a sip and groan about the water being half-warm, ignoring the nosy eyes of working passersby that take peeks at me. I'm getting tired of being alone. I wish I had asked where Cato was or where the other Careers were being kept so I wouldn't have to be by myself right now, just shambling around aimlessly.

The lukewarm water trickles down my throat. It brings a clarity to my mind, buzzing me more to life with each drop. "Clove?" Someone utters from behind me. I sputter at the water, little droplets landing on my vest as I turn around. Glimmer looks the same. Her light blonde hair reaches her elbows, glittering in crisp waves, her large green eyes bright and determined. "Oh my God, _Clove!" _She rushes to me, and when she reaches me, she stands, not quite knowing what to do, her arms out in front of her as if offering a hug. She brings her arms back down when I stare at her as if she's insane. Good idea.

"Glimmer, what the fuc -" I begin to say, and a woman narrows her light brown eyes at me as she passes, dutifully pushing her cart of supplies. "What the hell?" I ask, lowering my voice. "Where's Cato- did they revive him? He didn't win, did he?_"_

Glimmer furrows her brows at me, and I'm slightly irked at the oddness of the thought of Two's own favorite blonde oaf winning. Cato always had potential, but I never thought of him as a_ victor_. Maybe a second-place winner, behind me, of course. A real victor, though? Like Finnick Odair and Johanna from Seven? Only in Cato's dreams.

Glimmer shakes her head, her full lips pursing together. "No. Katniss and Peeta - the 'lovebirds' from Twelve - they beat him to it. Kinda just... shot him into a pool of wolf-things."

I hurry to seal my lips - my jaws are about to fall open. I wasn't Cato's best friend in the arena, and we weren't dating, but there _is_ a catch to all of that. When you spend weeks with a dude, protecting him from weapons and trying to keep two other idiots from getting mauled, you may bond a little with him. You may begin to consider that 'dude' an actual acquaintance of yours. "So is he here?" I ask Glimmer.

She gives me a revealing half-smile and her eyes glitter, like there's a message behind them. I half want to carve the smile off of her face. "Of course. I haven't seen him, but Marvel mentioned him once or twice in conversation." Marvel. I pretend not to hear his name, and I stick to the basic thoughts, like, where _is_ Cato? Should I find him? What room is he in? Will I be spending_ all_ of my time in this goddamned hospital?

Glimmer's waiting for me to say something, and I nearly sigh, wondering how she ever mustered up the ability to survive through the Games. But then I remember that she didn't - she was stung to death before even _Rue_ was killed. And I inwardly laugh off my ass at that.

"Uh, Clove, I stay on the eighth floor. That's where the revived tributes' rooms have been placed. I'm going to take a nap; I can show you where your room is on the way."

I want to snort at her. Major red flag. Walking and talking involves a conversation. No thank-you. "Thanks princess, but I've got a hospital to check out," I tell her. It's times like these that I wish I had a knife to twirl in my fingers, but shaking my head and furrowing my brows seems suitable. Her reaction is just the same, flipping blond locks over her shoulder and raising her nose pompously. Nurses clop past us in their not-made-for-the-job heels.

"I'll just have Marvel show you tomorrow."

_"No," _I blurt, walking diligently past her toward where she had gestured. She follows behind, and I silently take note of her tiredness and shuffling feet. "God no, Glimmer, what's wrong with you? You know how I feel about that dofus. He wore a feathery boa for the tribute parade -"

"- Not his fault," Glimmer cuts me off.

I sigh inwardly at the blonde, and when I start toward a pair of held-open doors, Glimmer turns me by the shoulder to a small glass elevator. "Doesn't matter." I tell her. "Half of the time he dresses like he's gay_." _I say these words and Glimmer neglects to look at me. She's a few inches taller than I am when we step side-by-side into the elevator. Even so, that doesn't stop me from glaring daggers into her head.

Her lips part, green eyes darting towards me. She seems to search in her mind for the words she should say, and I roll my eyes before she can. "You're feeling alright, aren't you?" It seems more awkward for her to ask than it is for me to hear it. I cross my arms, brows furrowing. An insult readies itself to fire past my lips, and I think that she can feel it coming. Her next words are bitten. "I don't want Doctor McCary to be mad at me tomorrow for not - "

I sniff at the blonde beside me. My feet are bare; cold as stand on the elevator metal. "Oh, really? I'll let him know where he can shove his doctorate," I tell her. It might be self-absorbed, how my lips crack into a smirk at my own joke, and I can feel Glimmer eyeing me over, but it doesn't count for a damn. Her gaze taints itself with jaded disappointment; her pink lips growing pursed and thin.

The elevator's glowing numbers dwindle. Floor eight. The glass walls clatter as the box rocks to a stop. Glimmer tries to turn to me as she leaves. I don't follow. A second - one second is all I allot her to smudge her lipstick on my behind. "Clove -" There are rings around her eyes. Purple lines in otherwise impeccable skin. It seems like a heavy effort for her to smile - do do anything but gaze. She didn't look this bad in death.

"Glim -" The word falls from my tongue, but it's cut off when my eyes land on the image of Marvel. Yards past her, he moseys, and the hall's bright light illuminates his every _annoying_ inch. "Sorry - nope - can't do it." Before her lips part, I smash a random button so hard that my finger turns red; sore. Her emerald eyes roll.

The hospital room that Enobaria had me hidden in was on the floor that the elevator finds itself rolling back to, and now, my mind tumbles with the thoughts and wonders of where my counterpart must be. I know how he dies already; even now, somewhere deep and dark, dozens of insults marinate so I can tease him for it. If I'm going to look for him, I'm starting here.

Every metal door is coded with a padlock. The missing key is a card, presumably one for them all, I suppose, but I don't really find myself giving a damn. To my every side, nurses stumble by in sterile uniforms. One of them is bound to have a key on their person, whether it's tucked into a slutty purse, speckled with cheetah print and rhinestone bullshit.

My body feels heavy. As I lean against the wall, my shoulders droop. Everything on me has been... 'polished'. Minimal scars reside on my flesh. And somehow... somehow, that irks me. Whoever doctor McCary is, he's seen every inch. I purse my lips together as I wait for a nurse; one who looks vulnerable for no-one to really miss her. The first woman who approaches me parts her lips with a complaint, but my fist is already marking its name into the side of her face before she can utter it, and her body crumples to the ivory tile at my feet. Yes, I'm barefoot, still. And she is unconscious.

A maintenance door to the left of our bodies opens with the use of her card key. It's a simple maneuver, shoving her limp corpse into it. Her skull cracks with a slick thump as it swings into the wall. Trails of blood leak onto the ground. The door closes with ease. Behind it, her body is hidden, so I leave.

Her card is a hunk on plastic in my renewed hands, and I slide it through a metal box near a door and continue on my trek through the quiet hallways. My bare feet slap against the tile. There are multiple sections to this place. The hallway branches off into two corridors, and I find my fingers brushing the walls of the one with the large '2' painted onto its entrance. Lookie there - I was right about _something_. My eyes trail over the hinges of the room I once lay in, and feet apart from it is a door identical to mine.

I don't hesitate. My hand wraps over the silver handle of Cato's door. And when I turn it; when I lean against it, push it open, the sight that greets me is repulsive. The sudden wave of nausea overtakes me like a hurricane. I can't pinpoint the reason.I double forward. My hand dives to my stomach. It's nothing short of gruesome. Cato's mangled body is a pad of mangled flesh lying of the surface of his hospital bed, ivory sheets pooling over his vitals. Not one inch of flesh goes without injury. Stitches trace his bits of skin in crude brown lines. My hand reaches for my mouth on its own accord. I feel colder than usual.

I'm not sure why I do the next thing I do, but I sure as hell feel like I have to. Stepping further into the sterile room, I reach a palm to Cato's bent shoulder. My feet are quiet over the tile. His flesh is like a furnace beneath mine. His blood boils. Nausea. Sickness. They duel over a place in my empty stomach. And then his eyes flutter awake.

My figure moves backward suddenly. Raw horror is etched into the creases of his face deeper than the shock in mine. His voice is shaky and scared with every word - every aching, painful syllable, and his agony glows through his demeanor. "Clove." His voice quavers. "Clo - Clove, it won't..." A scream, and a fearful yelp passes my lips. "It won't_ stop_!" His voice cracks with his effort.

The spit that slithers into my mouth is bone-dry. I shove it downward. "Cato -" His scream of pain is overbearing.

"Get them off me, Clove! Get them -" In a sudden jerk, every ounce of him surges forward, and pure muscle clamps over my wrist. It wrenches, twists as I try to move off, and pain spikes through my arm's bruising flesh. "Get them _away from me_!"

An inch of fear juts into my tone. I'm yelling, now, for anybody. Every care is thrown into the air with my dense screams, but no-one can hear me. No-one can hear me over his demonic pain. "Cato! _Cato!_"

"Take your knife, Clove! Clove, take your knife and kill me. Please!" His screams meld into a mournful sob - a long string of mumbling an agony. It's as if he's subjecting himself to this torment. His endless hell consumes him. I have no knife. Everywhere I look, I have no knife, and my eyes can only dart, helpless. "_Clove!_"

A bald man shoves his way into the room with a line of nurses following behind. "What the _hell_ are you doing? His eyes are om mine. The man takes hold of my hand; wrenches it from Cato. His voice is filled to its trembling brim with something I can immediately place. Worry. For me. For his... _patient_. My eyes float to the 'McCary on his medical robe. He doesn't wait for me to answer, and as one of his nurses jolts to Cato's side, another one of them wraps their hands around me.

She runs me through the halls, and I drop the access card I had. Every elevator is a rushing tube of horror. The lights scald me, so with my memories, I find myself aching to hide - to forget every bit of what I saw, but I know that that it weak. I am pushed into my room beside a metal door labeled 'M2'.

It was worse. There was more pain in his death - it was worse. As I sit on my bed, my hands tremble. My legs feel frozen. "Where were you?" Enobaria jumps into the room before the door can spring shut, and a tremor of annoyance jitters through me. I neglect to turn to her. My eyes are solid. On the ground; wrenched tightly shut in petrification. Her hand is on my shoulder, and I know not to move. I know to ignore her. "Where the fuck were you, Clove?" She hisses at me.

_'Ignore her.'_ But I can't. "Get out of my room!"

Her grip only tightens, and I swallow down a pained wince. "Don't you_ talk_ to me like that." Her voice quavers on the final word. I scoff. _Weak_. "Clove, why don't you listen?" She asks. It's a rhetorical question. I can tell. The tone of her voice - the inexplicable hurry that boils inside it.

My mind flashes back. I killed a nurse; escaped the hospital room; bothered... terrified Cato. My chestnut hair brushes my legs with my head's every quivering shake. I _know_ why I don't listen. But the better question is why is _she_ such a bitch?


	3. Pt3 - (Clove) Prerogative

**PART THREE: PREROGATIVE**

**(POV - Clove)**

The very next day, every doctor in the Capitol building votes to have me isolated in a basement. Enobaria had just shown herself away from me the previous evening, and I was lying criss-crossed on my bed. My shoulders were slumped. My mind shuffled sluggishly through every menacing thought that troubled me - it made not attempt to stop. No attempt to grant me freedom. If I'm living in a hell now, then that situation was inexplicably worse. Images of Cato's mangled body flashed like fireworks behind my wrenched-shut brown eyes. It wasn't very long until new company came barreling in.

Doctor McCary. His gaze was naturally yellow, sullen. Balding brown hair floated in wisps over his glowing dome, and it took me a while to glance up at him. Now that I think about it, alone in this dungeon, picking at my grime-blanketed nails, I am filled with a gladness that I did. He had a fine comb-over.

But below it, his face burned with a certain fire. I was used to people being angry at me, but I never could push myself to quite give a damn, because when it usually came down to it, I could impale them with a steel blade. Stress lines were deep on his face. The fattest men I had ever laid eyes on stumbled in abaft him. All of a sudden, my room was beginning to adopt the strangest aroma of sweat and cottage cheese. In their white suits, McCary's assistants looked like Peacekeeper. They had none of the ensigns etched into their shoulders - nothing that overtly screamed such a thing. "No, I'm not throwing a party." I was practically murmuring through the drying tracks of my tears, which I was pretty sure were making me look vulnerable in front of them. "Glimmer's throwing a _huge_ one."

"Clove." At the noise of Doctor McCary's voice, I am immediately reminded of my remark about where I'd help him shove his doctorate. Suddenly, I'm infused with a desire to know if he had heard me say that. Even when McCary wasn't screaming at me, I would be struck with a sudden intimidation. I _preferred_ that he yelled. He just sounded disappointed, and at the forefront of my mind, I was pondering the thought that told me I was weak for even admitting that it affected me. "My team of nurses are irate at where they found you. The intensive care floors are off-limits; you were _released."_

I opened my mouth to speak up; filled my lungs to their quavering brims with air that boiled me, but the air only trembled. "- I _know _he was your ally. Irrelevant. Should you be discovered anywhere _near _those floors, you will be detained and fed only saltines, understood?" Again, I breathed, but I couldn't finish. The intensity in his sentences seemed to heighten. "He's being operated on. It is very important - pivotal to his survival, and for waking him up, he _may_ not make it."

I'm not sure how to take those words. Were they a threat? A warning? "You cannot do that, Clove. Here, you _cannot_ get what you want." His eyes narrow. The guilt I feel - the weakness - it overpowers any shard of impulsive anger. "Stay in this room."

It was a sudden thing, what happened next, and any tears that brimmed my eyes from Cato's danger were cleaned frighteningly quick. The doctor's words were abridged with the bang of the door. A woman dressed in hospital robes pressed her hands onto his shoulder. The lines that were etched into her face were of pure mortification. I could feel what happened next. In my bones; in my very pulsating nerves. The foulest curses ran circles in my thoughts. "Doctor!" She shrieked. "On the IC floor - there's a problem."

McCary blanched. His eyebrows knitted themselves in the strangest confusion. "Mariah?"

"We just - we just found..." Her following words were stated like a question. "We found Sylvia in the closet. Her skull is cracked. She's been there -" A breath. Her chest rose and fell rigorously as she gasped each puff of suffocating air. "I don't know - an hour?"

For the slightest moment, McCary's face flooded with horror; with panic, and I watched him sternly as it changed. It was like he knew already - there was no hope. Without looking, he could tell. And with a swift motion, the Peacekeepers scrambled toward me and had my frame held down, pinned as McCary loudly cursed. Marching from my room with Mariah, anger blurred his features unrecognizable. I kicked, punched against their iron grips, but it was only fruitless, as seemed to be true regarding everything else. My games - fruitless. Cato - fruitless. My life...

Handcuffs were tightened over my trembling arms, and like a hockey puck, I was pushed. The hallway's length was large and daunting. Every stairstep I traveled was met with my tumbling down into the Peacekeepers' grasp and the basement levels were far beneath the building. My ears popped. Discomfort. Cold. I'd been put in the Psych Ward, but every time I tried to justify it, no reason would present itself.

The cement floors were joined with four walls - all equally impenetrable. I was slammed onto my knees, and the iron door that was behind me was shut with a boom. The noise rattled - never, ever seemed to stop. The sleep was uncomfortable that night. Every breath I crammed was heavy. I sounded like an asthmatic fat man. A symphony of curses echoed through the cement room until a bag of saltines slid from a hidden chute that I couldn't fit through. I spent the day counting them, consuming a random number, and counting how many remain.

My saltines are gone now. I've thought of asphyxiating myself with the plastic packaging, but none of those deaths seem very appealing to me. My throat is a desert. Hot, putrid. The room is large. In the center of the room is a drain, but not a drop of water presents itself, nor a drop of blood. And I have no tears - no remorse for which to cry.

The voice I hear is a delusion. Technical-sounding. A woman. My sore neck is positioned toward the ceiling and my head pounds like the center of an Oriental gong. Something about a trial; bail. I rest as it speaks.

Whatever dream I have, I'm suddenly jerked from, and it scuttles into the opaque mist of my brain. The door shuttles open. It bursts, like the smirk on my mentor's face and the joyous grin on mine. "Brutus," I tell him. I _sound_ weak. I don't feel it.

His grin is shattered. Taking me by my hands, I am cold in his grasp, and the cuffs are loosened. They clatter to the cement ground. "It's been _two_ days since you woke up, Clove." That same, harrowing disappointment. Remorse creeps into me as the hallway's light approaches with our steps. "You're _already_ in _serious_ shit."

I can't speak for a moment. An elevator. He presses a glowing button - one that I'm too unfocused to hone in on. I need food. My stomach - blackness inches into every corner of my vision. "I can't... Brutus, I can't." I would kill him if I weren't dying from the inside out - if my head weren't pounding - if it didn't loll against the elevator wall in brutal defeat.

His eyes neglect to soften, and he grips me by my bruised wrist where Cato once had me held. The skin there is mauve. A dark purple in the pool of brown that frames it. I didn't notice it. But then again, I didn't want to. I'm glad when he doesn't say a word. He's starting to piss me off. The doors move open on their own accord to the picture of a sloppily-arranged court with shitty isles of food. This is floor Four. It appears that tables have been dragged in from all over the building and partially organized. At every angle, a nurse sits and nibbles an a tasteless sandwich. Brutus' warmth escapes me, and my eyes briefly trail to his solid frame where he moseys to Enobaria, gesturing, vaguely pointing at me.

I can't quite give a shit about his unrequited love yet. It's too early in the whatever-the-fuck time of day to become Glimmer.

My knees buckle beneath my sore body, aching at every curve - every empty crevice. I stagger myself toward a smocked man selling burgers. His teeth are of the color blue, his hair blue, his skin a sickly shade, yet for a reason I'm simply too _through with this _to place, the gleam his eyes produce is of the color crimson. Meeting his eyes, I feel myself scowl. My body leans itself against his counter, hands scrambling for the burger I demand. Each digit tightens over my burger when the guys offers a price. I'd just pressed it to my lips, and now I'm glaring knives at him from over the stale sesame seed bun. "$5.50, miss..." His stupid eyes flicker to a list. A list of names; asses - I couldn't give a damn, and at the intoxicating scent of this sandwich, I'm about ready to pound on his face with my knuckles. "Hellion?"

I can only muster the strength to blanch. No-one is behind me in line. I lean, my elbows painfully positioned on the grimy counter top of his shop as I hold the burger before my mouth. "Are you_ frickin'_ retarded?" A dull tomato slice slips from my patty and slaps to the metal I lean on. My words are slurred, my vision blurry, and this idiot's eyes just _burn._ I deploy my mentors' single strategy. Reach for the nearest meat cleaver just inside his booth.

"Clove, you need to quit shitting bricks already." Marvel's mannerisms are oddly stable. His clover eyes grasp the booth's edges with a brief swoop for a menu or another shitty list. The ugliest beaten wallet reveals itself in his slender hands, and he shuffles through its insides. "Here, $5.50," he tells the guy. I scowl at his every movement. The money he slides amounts only to $3.25. That isn't what has me bothered, however. It's just his... his _face._

I don't let him get near me as we walk the perimeter of the cafe. He flips through his money and shoves the wallet into his slacks as if his mind is being roamed with ideas as to what the hell he could possibly say to make me appear less disturbed. He thinks for a moment as we slide into a table across from each other. As he concludes that there's just no way either of us will like each other, his eyes clamp closed for a disdainful instant. Then they flicker open. There doesn't seem to be a shit in the world that he could provide me if he wanted to. "I hope you got off on murdering that nurse." There's a hint of a smirk that he cracks at his own joke.

As I work at inhaling my burger, his eyes seem to skid on some depressing thought that deflates that grin as soon as it comes. I sort of wish he'd found a way to rob that guy of a drink, too. "You get off on everything." My voice is as menacing as I can muster. I infuse it with false pity _just_ for him. "Except Katniss," I spit. "No..." and my voice leans on the word. "She didn't like you well enough."

Something seems to linger on Marvel's tongue like a virus. His lips are pushed out as if he wants to curse at me, but, and _this_ is quite the blessing, he doesn't. I inwardly commend his judgment until my eyes catch like Velcro on Glimmer's image. She skips into the vicinity. Okay, well, she doesn't _skip, _but with that flowery blonde hair bouncing like a friggin' trampoline behind her, it's kinda hard not to imagine it. I think I hear Marvel exhale the word "Bitch," and I can't narrow my eyes at him before Glimmer's sitting beside him and is kneading the bruises on my arms and wrists. My burger drops to the table and spews a dribble of mayonnaise over my shoulder.

As she gushes, I watch a tiny bit of the condiment slink down from Marvel's hair. "You got sent to the holding pen already, you insane..." Her tiny hands simultaneously rub over my flesh, and I relinquish the scowl that's been held so far back. "You're kidding me." She releases my arms. They smack onto the table. Small crowds of Capitol doctors mill about with their lunch trays.

"I don't kid." My burger had decomposed already before me, so instead of munching another bite, I chunk part of the soggy bread at Marvel. I relish, for the moment, in his ghastly expression. When Glimmer resumes, it looks like Marvel is about to scream.

Glimmers eyes pan the area of the Cafe' as if she'll be killed again. She leans a little closer into my area, and I find myself moving a little further back. The burger - its spices drench my insides in heat. It's like a brick of thick goop within my stomach. What Glimmer asks causes me to scoff through the pain. "Did they hurt you?"

"_I_ hurt me." It's a bit strange telling the truth this time. The cement ground of the basement, otherwise known as the 'Holding Pen', was incredibly hard, and I probably shouldn't have thrown a fit as huge as I did, but everything's fine. It's okay. I could be worse for wear right now, like the tributes who'd never been revived from the start. "You wanna know what it was like?" I can see it in her face. Peeking a stolen glance over at Marvel, he feverishly wipes burger bread from his shirt, but his eyes contain interest.

Glimmer frowns. She looks almost guilty to admit it. I open my mouth to begin to explain it all. The noise gets stuck inside, like a wedge. What was the experience like, really? Nothing much floods into the barriers of my mind but the extreme feeling of boredom and hunger. The pain. The throbbing, beating, intense, and jarring pain. When I could, I'd tried to fall asleep. I call off providing an explanation, much to Marvel's slight amusement. I feel the urge to stab away his smirk. What a shit-gurgler.

"You slept in there for about three days." Glimmer provides the info, and her green eyes are expectorant like she anticipates for me to gasp in great awe. She gets something close, instead - I almost cough. "I forget what it's called. That action where they inject you with things to put you to sleep..." She doesn't look overly confused about the entire thing, but her nose scrunches up like what she's describing is right on the tip of her tongue.

I cringe as Marvel offers, "Sedation." The smirk would be more visible in his expression. Right now, the only smile that he can manage to force is all indented with lines. For some reason, when he catches my eyes, there is the gleam of a hint of a glare. Glimmer can sense it. That's how come whenever she talks next, it's like she's attempting to hold me back.

She nods at Marvel, and they lock eyes for the briefest of instants. I try not to pay any mind to the brief spark of attention that is lit in her gaze at him. "That's right." What are we talking about? Sedation? Glimmer frowns. She grimaces at herself. Like poison has just welled up in her mouth.

A Peacekeeper steps into this room that they call the cafeteria. It walks toward us, androgynous and large-standing with each of its heavy footfalls. The gun that is strapped to its slight wiggles slightly. The person in the suit clamps its hand over the weapon. "Follow me, the three of you," it says, and I cringe at the high-pitchedness of its oddly feminine voice.

We're told to tromp our path behind her and into the hallways. 'Her'. That's what I've decided, but something in Glimmer's body language continues to tell me that this person's sex is still only being sorted out. We're forced into another elevator, and I can only thank my stars that Marvel's shoulder isn't pressing into me. The doors slide open to black marble floors and freshly, mopped lines of tile, black entrances wide open to many dark rooms. Towards the end of this hall, the Peacekeeper decides to stop at a random door. She slides a card-key through its lock, and my body rockets forward into the backs of Marvel and Glimmer. Glimmer's skin feels colder than that of the former. Her eyes are dark and swim with something like alarm. I stand closer to her.

The doors are held open to a darker room that bombards us with a smell of must. Dim lights hang from the ceiling and sway beneath the air of the single stirring fan overhead. The same dark green flooring. The same wooden walls. Peacekeeper in the back up the room stare us down through glass visors. Our Peacekeeper sits beside them. There's a table. Familiar faces are present to greet us. The sad part is that all of them are littered with dark traces of something solemn. At the very beginning of the table sits a man I haven't met. His skin is as dark as rough charcoal. His head, shaved, glistens with sweat beneath the room's dim illumination.

Brutus' Enobaria. A lady I don't know. The list strings out in a perpetually-stretching scroll that clutters up my head to its frail edges, and one of the older women looks about ninety. I recognize her as a victor. And then there's gloss. Cashmere. At these two's order of "Come sit," I am not very surprised that Glimmer and Marvel join them immediately. Glimmer's hand wraps itself around the bruises of my wrist and tugs me, hurting, along. I grit my teeth to hold back the gasps that threaten to ruin me. My composure wavers.

"The Rebel Forces." The dark-skinned man has a voice that propels tension into the room. His tornado of a deepness sends silence spiraling within the walls like a whirlwind. "Led by more than one Victor. Katniss Everdeen. Johanna Mason. Finnick Odair. Annie Cresta. Beetee Latier..." The words that passed his mouth shook. "They are growing. Constantly." He rises from his chair. My eyes follow him as if glued to his aura. He commands the attention.

"Their bases in Thirteen are being prepped for was against us," he begins, and pauses only to take hold of a remote and to press a large button. A screen flickers to life. Thirteen stands in all its glory before us, and now the lights that swing overhead are nothing more than useless cords. As I think that, an Avox flicks them off. "This, is their Headquarters. We must raid them."

A gasp tumbles over Glimmer's lips. I perk a brow at the back of her head, and as another button is pushed, the shilloette of Katniss is summoned before us on the screen. Her lips quiver in fearful motions. The words, as if they are not pumping into the room, are shown beneath her tear-streaked face. My fists clench in eachother, and Glimmer tosses a glance in my direction. It's her again - it's Katniss. Why the fuck couldn't I kill her? Why the hell did I have to die?

" - Fighting back. We must defeat them. After all that they have done... after every life they've burned to dust... we must bring justice to the Capitol." Her arms rise above her head in this final sentence. Ruins of District Eight bring pillars of smoke to define her poisonous frame, and the technology shakes with a whimper. She looks desperate. Her eyes burn like the rubble on which she stands, and it's a sudden thing, how much I feel like lunging.

Her image turns to black. Abrupt. With the sudden power-down, the room is plunged into darkness before the lights are brought to life and everyone's great silence weighs down on my shoulders. Glimmer's eyes are like wide, verdant saucers.

This entire time, I've been dead. Oblivious. "This is why." The coal-skinned man floats into the center of the room. No-one interrupts. "We've got to destroy the Rebel Forces. Our tributes have been revived to _train, _to _learn. _Their former mentors will _teach _them."

I can't quite help the scowl that blossoms over my face. It's enlightening. _I'm_ charmed. I haven't been hired for anything, but I can smell a good job when I'm near one. No chiropractor can tell me that they get paid more; that they're happier. And in my scowl is found an awful grin. My job is to murder Katniss Everdeen for myself. For Glimmer. Even for Marvel.

And the smirk I have - it dies on the peach skin of my lips. It is as cold and rigid as Glimmer's body sprawled over the grass, bloated - so staggeringly _gone. _The last wisp of an utterance sends my gaze drifting down to the metal beneath my feet. The last thing the leader tells us is that my district partner will not be coming back. A tear sears over the heating skin of my face, and it blooms a deep crimson. Like blood.

For Cato.


	4. Pt4 - (Clove) Illness of Perpetuation

**PART FOUR: THE ILLNESS OF PERPETUATION**

**(POV - Clove)**

The two days after the revelation, I sat on my bed, taking the brunt of the pain as it all came flooding over me. The nighttime had held me captive. Cato's room was beside me and my partner was dead. He was buried eight feet under the soil beneath a tree with worms scribbling unnoticeable tracks over and inside his stiff, gelid flesh. His arms were crossed over his waist, they told me. Enobaria let me know all about it, but she couldn't take any pictures. The only thing I got, the only _token_, was the badly-made-up imagination I mustered of his corpse.

It was too foggy in my mind for me to keep my grip held over it. It was dark. Dim; depressing. Finding out about the funeral, I was left to imagine the hurt. And in my mind, he was in a coffin from the Games. He was blanketed by the plush red insides of the case of metal. His eyes, having fallen deep inside of his skull, laid unable to see the world except for the darkened corners of it. I was afraid he was still alive in there. That he _could_ see. He was unable to scrape his gaze over mine in an attempt to find emotion.

My arms were needlessly hugging over my legs on the spot only bed that I claimed for myself. I recalled his voice in my head, and it sounded like metal seeping into my memory. _'Fuck off'_, and _'shit-face'_. There's this one memory that found itself rising from the pile. It funny to me, now, and I can even laugh at it: the very first time that he ever called me by my name. _'Clove, you bitch'._ I smiled into my arm and shoved away the cheesy grin for fear that it's burn me if I let it last. _'Clove, you bitch'_ had been coupled with a laugh that was dry and wry-sounding. It was a ray of light in the center of a place like the Arena. In that prison we were in, there had seemed to never be a reason to find humor in the first place.

The prickles of forgotten hair scratch at my flesh ad I press my cheek to a red knee soggy with tears. The grin that pushed past my agonized wails is so unfitting right now. My lips tremble, crimson, painted with pain. I escaped the shower ten minuted ago; repressed the compelling thought of hanging myself from one of its many knobs and nozzles, and now, here, I'm sitting naked atop my covers with every inch of me being battered with the cold air. And I feel the pain worse than I can feel the shame or even the briskness of the temperature around me.

My mind is torn in two with despair and desperate fog charging to its edges and stinging me with the only headache that I've never, ever deserved, and I can't even question the unbearable cold in this room. I just pour. I am wrung to pieces.

I still feel okay. I can lift my head to glare past the film of tears, glancing with darkened, glassy eyes at the bland wall clock above me. I can still muster the strength to take my pillow into my hands and, with shivering thumbs, awkwardly rub over the silken white cover. I still can press the material to my face and suck in a breath of my own aroma. The thing about my madness is that there is no method to it.

I haven't slept. I can't think a damn wisp of a thought. The one thing I can be sure of is that I will never go into that room beside me. I can glare at the wall and its white, glossy sheen. Coming within five feet of it, I'll let my lungs tighten and my throat squeeze its burning grip around each of my long-suffering, high-speed breaths, but going inside of it - even _pressing the tips of my fingers to the doorknob - _there's no chance.

My mind takes a trip down memory lane, and it's pretty damn sudden when it does, 'cause I can feel my chin twist over my shoulder and guide my eyes as they search the next wall that separates me from Cato's room. The edges of my lips are pulled down. The tears on the ridges of my eyes - they dry almost instantly. And now I'm thinking of my mentor, Enobaria. _'The real question is...' _Agh. My cheeks puff to their full size and the freckles on my face stretch with the scarlet skin as the memory chokes the dense fog in my pounding head -_ 'Why is she such a bitch?'_

The color of my hair is like oak, darkened with the beads of warm Capitol-purified shower water. I remember how it drenched me. And now, icicles seem to be forming on the ends of the tendrils. The hair feels like noodles from chicken soup as they follow the motions of my head. Enobaria is honest. She's honest with _me_, at least, and that's _all_ I can be sure of.

A day passes of weak training and softly-held knives with no throwing involved for but the plush dummies getting plucked at by my trembling fingers. I'd only mustered the energy to dodge Brutus' throws while he tried talking to me. He went easy. I held my fingers over a few strings that poked from the dummy he murdered, and he clocked that in as training for that day. I had to pretend to listen to his words. My lips could hardly move enough to form the responses. The muscles in my legs were firm enough to carry me while I stood shaking in a shell of a girl who used to be named Clove. The snark was like frost on my tongue. He could tell - I knew he could tell. It's why when I was sent walking back to my room on floor four, I felt more sick than I'd started out.

In the whole day, Glimmer hadn't visited me. And it isn't like I had any sort of problem with that; it was just that she always decided to join me at the most sketchy of times. I would be daydreaming against a wall, suffocated in the dust and dark sadness of some closet near my room, and she'd skip inside of it with me. Gloss caught her arm for me one time, when she was trying to do it again. She knew that I wanted my space. She just wanted to have space with me. She also needed space, just not all by herself.

I hate to think of Marvel's name, but when I do, I think of how he mostly has nothing to mourn Cato over. The two of them were never the biggest of buddies, and that was partially because Cato and I spent an astounding amount of our time labeling Marvel as a homosexual and things of the sort. It doesn't mean that Marvel ever gave a shit. The only one he was worried about was mostly the rat of Twelve. And then he skipped off. It was kind of a revelation then. Then, I suppose that Cato and I were starting to really learn where Marvel placed his loyalties.

Marvel didn't leave us until Glimmer died. I was fine with that. He left Glimmer.

Looking back, I was fine with that, too.

I'm secluded in my room with most of the lights off and the one television gleaming of the Capitol's newest faces right now. When static flashes on the screen, I'm expecting a local advertisement. Some new market must have opened up, or a new government building. Nothing of the sort comes on, and I feel my teeth chewing at the spot outside of my lips where an itch is taunting me. Her face appears again - it's the face of the rat. It's outlined by a sort of tune that reeks of heroism, gusto, justice. "The Capitol's gonna pay. It's gonna pay for what it did to us." And my hatred is brought to a boil through every inch of me as I replay the imagined image of her shooting an arrow through Cato's hand, the blade protruding through the flesh, the red and bleedy muscle. And then I imagine him falling to the pit and the mutts gnawing at him until she recovers. Until _she_ decides she's tired of hearing his screams.

It cannot be healthy, thinking like this. My fingers wrench around the remote. Something like a growl is gurgling painfully at the bottom of my throat like a roaring sheet of water in a storm, my face and lips scrunching and snarling around the white of my teeth as my arm sends it sailing into the wall, but her image stays untouched and quivering before my face, and I feel my hands clench into the oily tendrils of the hair on my head. I _yank_.

My lips breathe the words that tumble around in my mind. We... we need to learn to use guns.

Glimmer's standing at the door, and I have my head bowed against her image. My view is hidden by a curtain of frizzed hair. Her voice against the static is like a clear-sounding gunshot. "You're right. Do you believe ...?" Her voice is dying at the end. Her eyes are blooming at the pupils with the intensity of how I face her. Breathing, coughing, scouring the edges of my mind for some composure, I feel like a fucking burnt pancake.

With all the nonsense I mutter, she crust chooses real quietly to ignore all the words that I have to say. She's skipping toward the tv, and her feet are clad in slippers as she crosses honey arm around her chest. Her blonde hair is softly trailing over her back. She hasn't trained either. _'9:30, 9:30, 9:30'_. She's observing the time that fervently flashes itself on the built-in clock of the television. "You're watching Katniss?" she asks me, and I feel something like the vaguest implication of ire tug itself over the frustration that borrows itself like a dagger in my chest.

Now I'm glaring at her. She can't just see me, notice that the time is wrong, or anything of the sort. Instead of doing that, she inches her body closer, and now her hip is edging her frame on top of the corner of my bed. My whole body shifts itself beneath the motion in which my bed sways. It rocks beneath her weight. She tells me to look at her, because she has something to say, and now I'm scowling at her harder, and the hair is making creases and shallow cuts into the frail skin that covers my lips. "Clove, you have to listen." She's telling me this like it's impossible for me to hear from where my face is hidden.

My hands itch red-hot just sitting stagnant by my sides. I pull both of them to my face and scoot a tuft of hair away from my eyes. Her lungs suck in a charging breath. My eyes must be scarlet in color, I realize. The bags that hang beneath them feel like anvils of weight. "The fuck do you want?" _Glimmer._ I want her to leave right now - I want her to take off. Really, anything is better than Marvel. Just not now. Now, I would take even death.

"Clove." Glimmer's voice is falling. Every wave of Glimmer's words is infused with something like desperation. She's tired of this. She can't stop - she's so convinced that she can get to me right now. "Clove, I _do_ want to kill her." Marvel's name is breaking from Glimmer's lips like she anticipates the wild trigger in my reaction. "Marvel -"

"You'd better not say his goddamn name," I growl at her, blinking furiously at the tears that bubble at the very edges of my eyes, wavering, pulsating where they lay. Every inch of my body is boiling wet with the feeling of something going wrong."Don't you fucking do it, Glimmer."

And Glimmer does it. Of course it doesn't impact me as much of a surprise in the least. It was something I'd felt creeping in from the very moment she touched the knob of my bedroom and backed her existence into my life again. I feel myself start to break, and the strangest comparison for Glimmer's life is etched into my mind. She's like a truck that's meant for towing away totaled vehicles: she comes whether you want her to or not. "He _loved_ her, Clove," Glimmer tells me. "And it - it's wrong. I _know_ it's _wrong_!"

A scream roars itself to life from the bottom of my throat, bubbling and pouring over the hot edges. She's still babbling her delusions. I clench my fingers into the pillow and swing, greeted by a shatter and bang that resonates against the ground nearby me. "You have to get out!" I'm _screaming_ at her now; no matter how loudly I shriek into her face, she continues to grunt at me and squeal like a red, irritated pig. _'I know it's wrong, Clove! Clove, I know that it's wrong!'_

Her hand finds itself rubbing against my knee in comfort, but her whole presence feels like a roaring blaze in some abandoned forest. "No - no, Clove -" her voice now sounds calm, composed, like some kind of silk. I think to myself in awe about how quick it was for her to change her whole demeanor. I just focus on the calm. The ire seems to drain so rapidly, and I'm left alone by its energy. Now I'm just a tattered pile of shreds with a small piece of paper across me labeled 'Clove Helliot'. Now, I only seem to have my headache and my hate. "Clove, we're gonna get Katniss," Glimmer continues, "and we're gonna kill her. Alright?" Her eyes are shifting over each corner of my room, and the half-dried tears on her lashes are broadly glittering. She brings her eyes back as if she wants me to do the hula.

I say nothing. Not a word escapes my lips; I just drag my eyes over to to door and bring them back to my knees again in rapid succession, and at last, she leaves the room. The remote for the light is light putty beneath her finger, and I watch it curve as she lightly presses it. That simple motion throws the room into sheer darkness. I think she's whispering 'goodnight'. Here I am atop this bed, and as the clock continues flashing, ever-fervent, I give myself one instant to calculate just how early it is. Too early. It reminds me of how soon Cato had to die.


	5. Pt5 - (Clove) To Undertake

**PART FIVE: TO UNDERTAKE**

**(POV - Clove) **

Brutus' voice sounds gravely when he talks - as dense as charcoal when his words burst into the air nearby me, and there's a crook in my neck when I slowly turn to face him. My eyes graze over his - the green lying within the center of his irises glitters tiredly. "So, you've all probably already seen Peeta on the news." The _'so'_ in his sentence sounds more like _'suh' _when I catch it, but I'm not telling him. "Figured out where he is," he remarks, twisting the pinkness of his lips into two furrowed lines, looking like a cigarette should be lodged loosely between them.

Marvel once again has a sort of piss-gurgling smirk plastered all the way across his face, all twisty and curved up at the ends so much that it looks almost like one of those pitch-black cartoon Latin mustaches. "Capitol. He's here. With us." A snort rockets from my nose, and I catch it between my tightened fingers to muffle the noise. The last two words he said sounded so much like a question, I couldn't hold it in.

And then the simple glance I throw around the room's small perimeter garners a bit more of an answer as I wrestle in the view of Glimmer's narrowed, pin-pricked eyes. Yeah, I guess butting in with an obnoxious snort was a bit out of the realm of necessity, but the asshole had it freaking coming.

Gloss is standing beside Brutus with his shoulder pressed into the other man's side as if, by the freakish out-of-the-blue chance that they somehow got separated because they were acting too gay, his world would end in tragedy. So I just flash an upward glare at him from beneath the shadow of my hair.

"They're torturing him," Gloss is telling the group. He's got his finger pressed into a holographic picture levitating above the table, the entire image shuddering in a light as blue as his eyes as the lines in his face grow deeper with shadows. And now, worry seems to edge itself into his gaze, chiseling itself in beside a dollop of the smug satisfaction he seems to always have with himself. "The Capitol _just_ wants to have him see what you can do." He says it like we're dogs who have to be told that they can't piss on that spot on the carpet. "You, you, and you," he gestures at us with his finger. The smile his lips form is almost achingly fake, but I have a feeling that that's a tidbit I'd be frowned upon for openly mentioning.

So I just loudly groan.

Glimmer's already jumping at this guy's heels, her lips outwardly pouted, the green rays of the holograph flickering a pretty emerald over the moisture on her mouth. She's trying to look adorable for her mentor, and I just want to scream at her that he's gay. Because he totally is.

Even while she doesn't add the overly-inflated, pouty sound of his name, I can hear it lingering quietly on her breath with each of her words as she asks, "What are we seeing him for really? How can it help our …" Her voice dies down at the end when Gloss' fish-like blue eyes flicker up to meet hers, accompanied by the white, gleaming grin of a shark. His eyes brighten like he's got the words on the tip of the tongue - he just wants to see if she can guess what he's thinking first.

With this suggestive glance, I can almost hear Glimmer churning the cogs in her head to try to rush a stream of understanding. Marvel looks like if he weren't so pissed at me, he might burst in laughter.

Brutus stops Gloss' silly little game as if crushing a cockroach beneath a steel-toed boot, and a waterfall of giggles breaches the silence I once held. The laughter seems to brush away a bit of the fog that Cato's death was holding over me. It makes the light seem a little more clear. Now, the frown is scraped a little from my expression, and with each stifled laugh that I chuckle, it falls to the ground. Bit by bit. Brutus is talking about the plan, and I'm just watching my anguish flutter to the tile at my bare feet. It's almost pleasant.

Marvel's hand clasps itself briefly on my shoulder, and it moves immediately, rocketing from my shoulder as if, in that moment, he _knew_ he just caught a deadly disease. His expression - the crinkle in his nose and the lines between the furrow of his light-brown eyebrows - lets me know that he did it as a last-ditch attempt to get my attention, and just as I bare my teeth at him, my eyes float up to Brutus and I see why he even placed his stinking paw on me to begin with..

The mentor of mine who once smiled and took me into his embrace as he took me from the Loony Bin now shackles me to his threatening, almost comically frustrated gaze. He lowly growls, "Listening, Clove?" No use in opening my mouth now. I just allow my lips to engage in their challenging smirk. "This is all to be used as a twisted form of torture. Panem's beloved Johanna Mason's facing the electric pools _right now_. This is what we're doing."

Gloss butts in, his excitement simmering in his blithe expression. "As of now, we've got this thing on lock. To get Peeta to meet you guys in person - you gotta think about the horror that he'll get from it. To see the people who almost killed him. The scary Career girl that he _watched die_; the pretty blonde bombshell who at least looked kind of intimidating holding onto a bow."

Glimmer's entire posture deflates, and I feel like running out of the room before I let out a shriek of laughter.

"So, guys, we're doing this tomorrow," he says authoritatively. He strengthens his gaze at us as if we're all defiant little kids.

Gloss looks almost ready to hyperventilate, a giant and cheesy grin peeling his lips back from his shark-like white teeth in a cartoonish manner. I feel like a share his happiness. Some form of excitement boils over the edges of a steel pot in my very core, wiping bits of the sadness away like mud from a mirror. I can hardly push back the grin that threatens to invade my expression. My hair is frizzed around me in a wild and untamed nest, and I can see it tangling before my eyes, cementing in a feral-looking halo around my point of vision. Marvel has looked at me teasingly about it at least once since I left my room, however, I think he knows just who not to screw with. I think he knows how big of a dick it would make him look.

Even displaying his disgust in having to touch me, I think he's more than aware. So he lets me grin. Glimmer looks concerned at me, almost as if she isn't entirely allowing her mind to go with the plan - in the end, she gives me this tendril of joy without much argument at all. She looks every moment as if she would rather break past her walls of affection and take me into a reluctant, perfume-clouded hug. For _my_ sake.

I'm just really damn glad that she hasn't yet.

Fifteen minutes later, the clock has done its ticking. Marvel trails behind Glimmer as if so many things are traveling around in his stupid head. His face looks a little horrified. A little stricken. I know what he did. We all walk, we all move to the beat, pretending to be just _okay_ with the three of us sauntering into our respective rooms, but both me and Glimmer know what has him all fucked up, and I wish that she would _speak_. My chest is tightening, the happiness burning into a whirlwind of anger. We're both ignoring him. Freaking _speak_ up, Glimmer.

Uncut and jagged fingernails stab into my reddening palms and draw crimson. _Just say it._

Marvel's lanky body slinks alongside us, at least a total of six feet from my figure as my eyes narrow themselves into little black beads of coal, my mind repeating the noise of Peeta's echoed screams, repeating the image of the gush of his blood at the blade of Cato's sword, all glinting and shiny, accompanied with that _scream_ and anguished grimace.

_Screaming_. Boy, elation and rage, white and _fucking_ black - how does it change so fast? Marvel's not saying anything. He's just staring at the ground, his feet making stomping noises over the tile of this makeshift 'hospital', and even Glimmer looks like she's trying to search his eyes from where she can in her periphery, the green in her gaze twinkling. The emerald in his vision turning pure black.

When I roar at the son of a bitch, I'm not sure where it comes from. Almost like a rocket, I'm demanding him to _talk_, spinning on my heels, my smaller frame growing to skyscraper heights beneath the loom of his large shadow. I spit at him and shoot a storm of verbal bullets just so I can watch as my scalding words land in the center of his chest and make his skinny body jump. Nurses in white-riddled smocks grow frighteningly close.

Still screaming. Still screaming. Peeta, in my mind, is still screaming, and _I_ am still screaming. I practically bounce from the place where I stand and shout directly in Marvel's face - he has his hand on my shoulder to push my anger back, as the shock seems to have overtaken him more than just about anything. I yell at him, "Talk!" _Say it. Admit it._

I hate to have to say this, but he doesn't. He doesn't say anything - he doesn't respond... his lips don't even shift.

And now I'm staring into the depths of his eyes, emerald colors glistening among minute specks of brown. I can hardly spot the substance that he had in him to start with when the silver train dropped Cato and I to Marvel and Glimmer's sides, Gloss forcing smiles and hugs to happen between four of the only people in the world who shouldn't be in the same room at all. Marvel's cocky smirk and attitude. Though I viewed it absolutely insufferable for allying with him, I could hardly mask just how useful it'd be for bullshitting people.

Now, there's something in his eyes that convinces me he's been purged of every inch of the Career he used to be. My chest throbs, pounding a low and steady pain, my throat burning lava at its very core. I clench my teeth tighter around the words I wail at Marvel. My teeth stream a rush of pain downward, crossing over every one of my nerves individually with pain. "You thought that Katniss loved you," I grit at him, showering spittle from my lips. "You started to _believe_ it - don't deny it - _admit_ it!" I shriek, my vocal cords tightening and straining with hot sharpness, "And when she lost you, Peeta was the only snot-faced dick that she had left!"

Glimmer stands to my side, and I feel Marvel's fingers roughly grabbing around the remaining bruises on my wrists, the purple colors turning a dark mauve as my digits thump on his chest and he works to hold me back. "Marvel, _you_ killed your district partner. Marvel, she didn't have to_ die_!"

Streaks of blonde throw themselves to the stagnant air, nurses gathering about my sides, pressing at my lower back and stomach, their hands moving to pry me from the boy's face, and I see Glimmer's cheeks go scarlet. Heat floods into her expression like pebbles being wildly thrown over the edge of a cliff. She threateningly huffs the word, "What?" but I can't bear to hear it. Crimson in my vision, crimson in my ears - in my perception, the only sounds that I can hear are those of my own freakish shouts and the gurgling sound of Peeta's spurting blood from the injury of his leg, gaping as widely as the vision of my crushed-in skull. A rock. A rock. The word on my lips was one name - one _fucking_ name. It swirls around the corners of my and and it attacks me like a dog yanking on rotten meat.

"She didn't have to _die_, Cato!"

When I speak, I can hardly hear it. I just know that it's wrong.


	6. Pt6- (Clove) Limited Visitation

**PART SIX: LIMITED VISITATION**

**(POV - Clove) **

Yes, it's the next day. That went by fast.

It's why, when the next morning arrives and it's time to organize the list of savages who ride the hovercraft to Peeta's facility, the black-haired clipboard woman who approaches me is noticeably hesitant. Her teeth are clenching extra firmly with every syllable she says of my name. Her eyes are a staggering blue, hidden by a frayed order of obsidian bangs. "Cl-ove... Helli-ot."

I cross my arms and feel the texture of my cotton shirt, moving my thumb and index finger over the grey material and running my tongue quickly over my teeth. Glimmer hears me smack my lips, and I watch from my periphery as she rolls her shimmering eyes. I tap my toes in quick succession over the ground, mashing the rubber into the cement, the hovercraft propellers roaring over the sound of my voice. This chick is irritating, so I tell her, "Can you just hand me the clipboard? I'll do the spelling."

"Yeah, no," she drones. Her pink lips squeeze together with an irritable pinch, and her cheeks glisten an ever brighter sheen of peach beneath the sun's pounding weight. Her dark hair flutters and whistles about the edges of her face in the outdoor wind. Birds are nowhere to be heard, though morning has fallen. This woman named Jacksonn will never cease to look like she should be wearing pajama slippers with bright yellow stars on them, no matter how serious she looks as she peruses the board in front of her. "So it's _H-e-l-l..._"

"Yeah, like Hell," I interject.

"_i-o-t-t_. I had to write you onto the list. I was told to have you removed... yesterday." The skin around her eyes crinkles in millions of tiny little spots, the flesh darkening and turning thick around her bright sapphire eyes. The sun plays with the color of her gaze, fluttering between brown and blue as I judge her nervous appearance. Her voice is aimed at me, but she speaks to her clipboard. "Around nine in the morning, a call was placed to the CF Office accusing you of violence."

She speaks like she has bigger issues than this tiny gap in her work day. I allow my feet to guide my body side to side, jumping from left to right in a manner of restlessness. It comes to me as no real surprise that I was removed from the left, but Glimmer seems irritated by this entire thing, breathing a puff of anxious air from between overly-painted lips. Her arm brushes mine. She steps into the hovercraft with a punch of strength behind her steps. Her district partner must be somewhere in there, too - it's something I can observe in the way her mouth moves to form the letters of a familiar name as if reporting the arrival of a problem that doesn't concern her.

I awkwardly track the sight of Glimmer. Mrs. Jacksonn studies my face with luminous eyes, judging what actions should be taken next. I feel like, on the side of dealing with her motherly instincts, she's calling up chapters from some _'Shit to Make Pres. Snow Pleased With You'_ handbook. Poor little Clove, being given the cold shoulder by Glimmer for the fiftieth time of a thousand. In reality, I can't force my mind to find a single reason why dawdling on lost acquaintances can possibly be healthy for me. My mind is swarmed with tragedy - my eyes are constantly on the verge of being wet, my face red with the burden of thought.

I know. I know what I did - I know why it's wrong. I know why Marvel looked so freaking frightful with my hands leading towards his throat, his fingers clenching over the bruising flesh of my wrist. The first step to acceptance is admitting it aloud, right? A deep breath charges its way down my stinging wind pipes.

"I know, I hurt someone - I get it, can you just -" My eyes scour the scape of blue skies behind Mrs. Jacksonn's glittering hair, my feet skipping over the concrete ground anxiously. "Can you just lemme in? Please." I utter the final word forcefully and try to keep my eyes from glaring at her. "_Please_."

"No, I —"

"Jacksonn, let my tribute into the aircraft," breathes a female voice ripe with authority; tinged with truth. Enobaria's brown hair floats over her head, shaved close to the root and spinning on its tiny rivulets of curls among the wind's influence. Her fangs glint in the sun. I try to keep from backing away upon hearing the edge her voice contains in it. Looking at her now, especially with the haircut, she looks ten times more threatening. No soft waves of hair to frame the sharpness of her face. Her cheekbones are like blades. Dark skin, colored caramel beneath the light, carries the shadows of her frustration.

If Jacksonn's eyes can physically stammer, that's what they're doing now. Hell that's what _I'm_ compelled to do right now. I loathe the expression that I'm 3000% sure I'm giving Cato's mentor. I'm sure it broadcasts something along the lines of _'Where the fuck did _you_ come from?' _

Enobaria's posture radiates a hint of something broken. Her eyes flitter down to me from her side, peering over at my eyes from the edge of her shoulder. Something about the memory of Cato gives me the urge to ask her questions - bombard her with queries, the answers of some she will never, ever, be capable of providing. _'Tell me about the training score. Tell me about what he thought. What'd he think... about this?_ There was a sponsor gift we once received in the middle of the arena. I remember it floating from the skies, accompanied with a tiny square of paper that drew angry lines into his face when his eyes read over it. _'What was on that goddamned note?'_

Mrs. Jackson drops her clipboard down to her side, pressing the stupid gel pen back behind her ear. I feel my face scrunch at the weakling apology she gives. Enobaria's huff of annoyance should be more than a clue - my name was never supposed to have been removed. Everyone gets pissed off at Marvel once in a while; why was I going to be punished for this? Kind of a stupid question because yeah - I killed Cato. Sure.

The helicarrier is a cold compartment full of stagnant, chilly air and virtually no circulation when one takes a breath - especially not when I I breath deep, lung-filling sighs of air to purposefully catch Glimmer's attention. Really, these actions only serve to garner her gelid stare, the emerald colors within her gaze twinkling with something angry and judgmental. This wasn't exactly what I had been expecting from her, if I am to be a frank narrator. Honestly, I had trusted one of Glimmer's breed to produce a warm knitted blanket from the depths of some dark corner and come with her arms extended and a pout in her mouth, her nose in a sympathetic crinkle as she rushes in her Capitol-provided shoes to my aid. Outside, she's seem to be that type.

It saddens me a bit, how instead, she sits by the side of Marvel almost in as much anticipation as burns inside be. It's as if she expects more than snarked remarks from her district partner. Or - and this is only to cover _all_ possible aspects of imagination - the depth dark mauve bruises beneath his eyes and the lines streaking his face are hinting to something that isn't arrogance at all. He isn't the same: that's a thing that, while screaming into his face so loudly my own eardrums trembled in fear, I reluctantly forced myself to conclude. Katniss really had whittled away at who he was. The smirk, though it is present, has faded. His eyes are darker with a depth only achieved by actual contemplation, which unfortunately hints to the inclusion of a _brain _inside that sparkly District One skull of his - something that also makes me want to break into a jaw-bending frown.

My knees bounce beneath all ten of my tightly clenched finger, and I bite my nails into the too-stylish-for-combat-but-_totally_-chique-by-Capitol-standards pants. I wanna to jump from this giant hunk of metal, but I just end up casting my eyes to the bright shards of yellow light that sink in through the window, illuminating the clouds that shoot past the glass in golden streaks. I wanna leave this chilly compartment and slink beneath the chastising gaze of Glimmer. Really, that's the _only_ thing I want. So I cover my eyes with my fingers and imagine the doors opening, my foggy image grabbing Brutus by the arm, dragging him into Peeta's chamber so he can just stand in the corner and watch - stand guard while I extract my joy from the sound of Peeta's screams.

I realize that I might have said that last part aloud when Brutus snorts a harsh-sounding noise, concern drowning the crease in his eyebrows as if water were dripping into his hear. "You just want..." He begins, and his lips squirm after he's already said the words. I'm glaring at him when he breaks into a sigh. He fucking knows not to say Cato's name around me but perhaps by this point I can accept somebody of Brutus' standing uttering whatever he wants. "You know, I know if Cato were here, you would feel a little more secure about this entire thing. You don't need him - I know that," he says, seeming to pause to chew on the inside of his cheek, "but every stressful thing is easier to do with the inclusion of a friend. It's a given. Even for those who've done what you and I have. Killed."

I don't notice that Gloss took spot on the aircraft until his voice emits from a corner of darkness on Glimmer and Marvel's side. And when he talks, his lips move beneath the glow of a blue light, the screen of his electronic device casting a hue over him. "People in the Games - especially those who've trained for them - are born with a sort of cold blood. A gene in them that lets them stab away the guilt so that, afterward, they don't have to suffer the effect of their actions." He speaks this words off-handedly, directing them to his tablet, it would seem at first. There's something of a stutter in his next words, and though he maintains a complete lack of eye contact, his eyes seem to deepen in their sockets. "Marvel _started_ that way. I know it for a fact; so does every person on this aircraft. People change."

Nobody seems to want to acknowledge the mentor from the Luxury District. Enobaria's cheekbones seem to shift an inch deeper; Marvel's eyebrow peaks, his mouth and lips turned outward in a scowl; Glimmer pretends not to notice.

Gloss' musing continues even past these silent gestures. "Sometimes the Games transform people even in places they never expected their lives to be altered. Tribute can enter the games as a caterpillar and leave a hideous moth hiding in its own shroud of pain. They leave the arena hating themselves because the prayers of killers are never answered. Sometimes, like in the case of Marvel, the guilt strikes you in the flesh and probes into your should before you even have the time to finish the job you came for. And you change _too damn early_." Gloss sounds on the verge of shouting, his voice straining to remain at an even volume. "But in this case, I suppose he's glad he didn't change too late."

That's what he leaves on. Suddenly, a rapid beeping floods the room with sound and as the large metal door creaks open, not a person moves an inch. The light of day drags along with it a somber wind.

Gloss' lips turn upward in a chuckle that makes my spine jerk. "It started as a plan. Pretend to love the timid rodent from District Twelve; the Capitol will fall to their knees and bend at the waist." His blue eyes smooth their way to Marvel's frame, and the anger in both boys flips to an echo of respect and disgust - two emotions that are so staggeringly different. Gloss' eyes are infected with a saddening restraint. It's hard not to imagine Cashmere's lacquered fingers grazing over his leg as he gutturally remarks, "Lots of things go wrong at lost of different wrong times, Marvel."

I think that I'm the only one who notices that, as people begin to file from the hovercraft in twos, Marvel has retreated to a corner of the plane where his face is blanketed in darkness, his eyes peeling themselves wide in a signal of denial. His face is creased with a wacky smile and his teeth glitter in the dark beneath a sheen of saliva as, through them, he counts a line of numbers. His eyes are squeezed shut. At this point, a thunder of footsteps exits the hovercraft and I notice that the body count is rapidly decreasing while Marvel sticks behind. I've been confronted with a choice that I should never have to decide over:

A.) Stick with Marvel and roughly hand him a shredded cloth on which he can wipe that insane grin from his mouth. Pretend that nothing happened before sprinting from the hovercraft inconspicuously.

B.) Follow behind Gloss, whose figure is rapidly retreating. Inwardly mock the way Brutus stands loyally at his side, both of them speaking words of friendship and whatever-the-fuck-else. Continue to speculate that Gloss is gay, but just to keep myself distracted from the fact that Marvel's completely lost his fucking shit.

I choose choice 'B' - yeah, sure I feel bad, but Glimmer takes the place I would have taken if I had decided in favor of choice 'A'.

My feet stamp against the concrete, a sprinkle of dust shimmering in the air about me, following my movements like magnets. The inside of the building echoes with the stomping noises that Enobaria, Brutus, and Gloss are making. Glimmer has shrunken back behind me, brushing our shoulders on her way to grab a hold of Marvel and awkwardly walk alongside him instead. Sure, it brings somewhat of n empty, hollow knock to the happiness that floods into me, but my thoughts are cut short by a distant wave of screams from behind a rickety door, far behind a maze of hallways and loops.

My head beats with a rocket of pain, but I stick it out - tell myself it'll all be worth the drama; the momentary hurt. My mind keeps flipping back a few pages to the image of Marvel's solemn expression, and about ten minutes in, a stench sinks into the path we've all been taking. Enobaria's nose scrunches far up ahead of me. I'm keeping back, sticking to myself. Their voices murmur hushed conversation.

Dirty cement floors, walls with leakage, lightbulbs swinging from open electric sockets and casting airy light into the hallway. A guard removes a ring of keys from his belt and clicks away at a large metal door. Marvel and Glimmer come up slowly behind. I notice they've separated, and I grin to myself. I guess that whole thing didn't last long.

The guard has breath that stinks like bird crap, and it's all I can do to not lift the hem of my shirt over my mouth when he speaks. "It has been requested that Helliot enters last. Just a precaution," he grunts.

Brutus attempts to smooth his hand over my shoulder, but I shrug from the touch and pass through the doorway, sitting on a metal bench and gazing through a window that leads to another torture room. Johanna Mason shies away from a rising pool of water. I watch her twitch for minutes on end, my eyes glittering with interest as the life is plucked out of hers. Her throat bobs painfully down and up and her nails claw at the white tile floor. Her shrieks pound themselves into the window, and though I view her so blithely, her gaze is blind to my frame.

Sweat crawls hotly over my flesh.

Thirty minutes.

Peeta's voice isn't screaming when his torture chamber comes open, but a rancid odor follows the tributes that leave the room. "Peeta got what came to him," Glimmer murmurs, the only hint of optimism in her voice being the generic preppy sound that I've grown accustomed to blondes having. Glimmer's jawbone and angles have been racketed to appear much more sharp. There's a sting in her eyes that wasn't there before. Even as I lift myself from the bench and saunter towards her frame, she pretends to be engaged with Gloss' disappointed expression - a popular tactic for pretending that people you hate have ceased to exist.

"I'll bet those torturers are having fun," I tell her, stretching to speak also to the chamfer's open door. Marvel emerges from the doorway as I shout, "Right, Lover Boy?!" Marvel's figure slumps to the ground as he follows behind Glimmer. His eyes linger on Peeta's supposedly sunken figure. and his bones are shrouded in depressed shadows as the door closes in his wake. I try to peek past him, but my legs aren't long enough to lift me to see. The lines in Marvel's face have been chiseled deeper. It's quite depressing, really. Excitement fills me to the core, and he can't afford to take a little enjoyment from his privileges.

As I had expected, Marvel has nothing to say to my actions, and Glimmer treats my words like bombs. She plucks around my messages like a timid bluejay, her blonde eyebrows lifting. "Clove, just..." she sighs. "Clove, later. Later, we need to talk - _really_. Alright?" I remember who she used to be when she smiled. When she awkwardly hugged me upon finding that I had woken up for the first time. She once was happy with me; I once would have called her my friend. Something tells me now, as I look at her with skepticism painting my face and my arms crossed gently, that our friendship is a thing she's grown tired of avoiding.

So I pout my lips. I don't say anything. I _can't _say anything. So I just shuffle past her a little, my shoulder brushing against her arm, trying to clear my mind of the fact that that ever happened.

Brutus says, "Now, here you go - it's your chance. It isn't like the Games, okay, he's chained. He's chained. he can't hurt you. If he tries it, he'll die. Okay?"

I bring myself to smile a bit, the dried skin on my lips crackling like glass. The door shifts open again, greeting me with a pungent, ripe odor of Peeta's rat-ness and wiping away the smirk that had sprouted in my expression. Suddenly, my excitement turns into a heat; the brightness in my eyes narrows into a glare, my feet shifting. I pull my fingers through dark tendrils of hair and pull back the greasy strands with a rubber band. "I get it, Baldie. You think I'm scared?" My feet take me into the chamber, and with the movement, Peeta's frame fades slowly into view. The door eases shut behind me.

Brutus' last words of encouragement: "You weren't scared in the Games, Rocky. What possibly could have changed you?"

I think to myself, Peeta's scared blue eyes darting towards _me_, peeking through lice-infested blonde hair at _me_, with fear rocketing through every rivulet of his body like a hurricane, and his whimper of fear reaches me. It touches _me_. Hurts _me_.

When was the last time I felt any pain?


End file.
